Saturday, December 17, 2016

The “Russia intervened in 2016 election to favor Trump” conspiracy theory is the Democrats’ last-ditch effort to subvert the election by convincing the Electoral College to vote for Hillary next Monday. There’s even talk of redoing the presidential election itself.

Thus far, all we’ve heard and read is hearsay — by the Washington Post, by Obama, by this or that senator or congressman — that there is a secret CIA report on Russia’s nefarious role in the election in:

Hacking the emails of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), Hillary Clinton, and her close associate, the very creepy John Podesta.

Giving the hacked emails to unnamed “agents” who then supplied the emails to WikiLeaks to publish.

“A statementmadeout of courtthat is offered in court as evidence to provethetruth of thematterasserted.”

The dictionary further explains that:

“theHearsayRule, as outlined in theFederal Rules of Evidence, prohibitsmoststatementsmadeoutside a courtroomfrombeingusedas evidence in court.This is becausestatementsmadeout of court normallyarenotmadeunderoath, a judge or jurycannotpersonally observethedemeanor of someonewhomakes a statementoutsidethe courtroom,and an opposingpartycannot cross-examine such a declarant(thepersonmakingthestatement).Out-of-courtstatements hindertheability of thejudge or jury to probetestimonyfor inaccuraciescaused by ambiguity, insincerity,faultyperception, or erroneousmemory.Thus,statementsmadeout of courtareperceivedas untrustworthy.”

And yet we are to accept that on the basis of hearsay about some secret CIA report, which no court would consider as evidence, the Electoral College should overturn the results of the 2016 election by voting for Hillary Clinton as president, despite Donald Trump having attained a majority of Electoral votes of 306 vs. Hillary’s 232.

But we do have a first-person testimony that is not hearsay — from former British ambassador Craig Murray, who claims he had received Hillary Clinton campaign emails, not from Russia, but from “disgusted” Democrat whistleblowers.

Alana Goodman reports for the Daily Mail that in an interview with Dailymail.com on Dec. 13, 2016, Craig Murray, who is a close associate of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, said he had flown to Washington, D.C. in September 2016 for a clandestine hand-off with one of the email sources. Murray retrieved the package during a clandestine meeting in a wooded area near American University, in northwest D.C. The individual he met with was not the original person who obtained the information, but an intermediary.

Murray said:

“Neither of [the email leaks] came from the Russians. The source had legal access to the information. The documents came from [Democrat Party] inside leaks, not hacks.”

Murray said the leakers were motivated by “disgust at the corruption of the Clinton Foundation and the tilting of the primary election playing field against Bernie Sanders.” Murray declined to say where the sources worked and how they had access to the information, to shield their identities. He said that Podesta’s emails might be “of legitimate interest to the security services” in the U.S. due to his communications with Saudi Arabia lobbyists and foreign officials.

Murray said he was speaking out due to claims from CIA officials that Wikileakswas given the documents by Russian hackers as part of an effort to help Trump win the U.S. presidential election:

“I don’t understand why the CIA would say the information came from Russian hackers when they must know that isn’t true. Regardless of whether the Russians hacked into the DNC, the documents Wikileaks published did not come from that.”

Murray’s account cannot be independently verified but is in line with previous statements by Wikileaks:

In August 2016, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange intimated that DNC staffer Seth Rich was the source of the DNC emails. At about 4:19 a.m. on Sunday, July 10, 2016, 27 year-old Rich was shot and killed in the 2100 block of Flagler Place NW in Washington, DC. His murder remains unsolved to this day.

More recently in November in an interview with John Pilger, Assange said, “The Clinton camp has been able to project a neo-McCarthyist hysteria that Russia is responsible for everything. Hillary Clinton has stated multiple times, falsely, that 17 US intelligence agencies had assessed that Russia was the source of our publications. That’s false – we can say that the Russian government is not the source.”

Murray is a controversial figure who was removed from his post as a British ambassador amid allegations of misconduct. He was a vocal critic of human rights abuses in Uzbekistan while serving as ambassador between 2002 and 2004, a stance that pitted him against the UK Foreign Office. Murray was cleared of charges of misconduct, but left the diplomatic service in acrimony.

His links to Wikileaks are well known and while his account is likely to be seen as both unprovable and possibly biased, it is also the first intervention by Wikileaks since reports surfaced last week that the CIA believes Russia had hacked the Clinton emails to help hand the election to Donald Trump.